Meanwhile, In Joppa

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Easter 4C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

Acts 9:36-43

“³⁶Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity. ³⁷At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs. ³⁸Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, “Please come to us without delay.” ³⁹So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them. ⁴⁰Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, “Tabitha, get up.” Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. ⁴¹He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive. ⁴²This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in the Lord. ⁴³Meanwhile he stayed in Joppa for some time with a certain Simon, a tanner.”

The lectionary surprises me sometimes.  Even after close to seven years of going through it, and not yet being completely in the habit of mapping out our Sunday morning messages far in advance, I’m caught off guard when the selections for succeeding Sundays skip a passage that I would expect to follow.  I mentioned last week at the beginning of the message that the passage for last Sunday was taking us almost to the end of the Gospel of John, and that we would probably be finishing it up today.  That turns out not to be the case.  The selections for today did not include those last few verses of John.  Don’t ask.  I don’t know the reasoning behind leaving that passage for another time.

But here we have it.  Of the passages selected for today, we have the story of Peter’s raising Tabitha, or Dorcas in Greek, from the dead.  Though it’s not spelled out in the text, it bears noting that, when we read about someone being resurrected in the New Testament, it needs to be distinguished from Christ’s resurrection in one crucial detail.   Each one of those other people who were resurrected eventually DID, once again, die.  Jesus did not.  Just thought I’d make a point of that, in case there were any questions out there. 

Remember that as we approach the scriptures today, our challenge is to do it with an eye and an ear to what those who first approached it centuries ago would have seen or heard in the story that would speak to them and why, and see how that would be the same touchstone for us today or if it may have changed over time. 

First, we review the story.  

It is, as the title states, a telling of the Acts of the Apostles – literally – things they did.  In this instance, we have Peter, the one we left on the beach professing his love for Jesus, and Jesus telling him to ‘feed his lambs, tend his sheep, and feed his sheep’.  We are today jumping ahead some indeterminate amount of time, though it could stand to reason that it was not a LONG time – perhaps weeks or a few months, and that same man who had left Jerusalem in the wake of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, after having SEEN Jesus and spoken to him and eaten with him he’d then TRIED to go back to fishing.  Apparently it didn’t work. 

He couldn’t seem to fight back this urge to tell the story, to let people know what he’d lived through, what he was a witness to.  And along the way, he is made aware of a woman who was a disciple who was devoted to good works and to charity, and who had died.  He’s not too far away from where they have her, so he goes to the house in Joppa where they have her body.  He gets there, is taken to the room where she’s been laid out, and the women whom she’d been working with, ‘the widows’, the text points out, show him the tunics and other clothing that Tabitha had made while she was with them… it’s an important note to make … it’s not just a passing comment.  What it let’s us know is that she was helping the most destitute population of her society – the widows.  And in knowing that, we know a little more about her.  To say that she was ‘devoted to good works and acts of charity’ gets the information across about what she spent her days doing, but adding the detail about the widows helps us know HER as a person – it tells us that her call was to minister to those who had the least recourse in first century Palestine.  Widows depended either on their children or on the kindness of strangers to survive, or they remarried, and marrying out of desperate necessity makes for truly untenable relationships. 

So we get to know a woman who knew Jesus and followed him and served as his presence in Joppa, with the most marginalized segment of society at that.  And she got sick and died. 

When one serves the most marginalized segment of society, it is usually lonely work.  It’s not exactly the most popular ministry to be involved in.  AIDS hospice care, a home for pregnant teenagers, or a homeless shelter for mostly mentally ill people.  There are any number of valid ministry opportunities vying for our attention and our efforts, to say nothing of our contributions.  So if one that is an ongoing concern is … dependent on the energies and efforts of a single dynamic individual, if that person were to suddenly disappear, that ministry is at risk of crumbling.  It’s not a criticism of the way the ministry is run; it’s a statement of the facts as they relate to difficult and challenging ministries.

We COULD look at this story of Peter’s raising Tabitha from the dead as simply a response to the critical nature of the ministry she performed being assured a continuation – at least until she could hopefully teach the widows to sell garments for themselves to gain some way to earn a living and not be entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers.   

But we could also see this story as presenting us with an image, a picture of Christ as he is conveyed through the life of a disciple.  The widows had found a … I could say benefactor, and though it would be an accurate description it wouldn’t, I think, communicate the full impact that Tabitha’s life was having on them. In losing their husbands they had lost all identity, they were very literally non-persons in that society, and Jesus, through Tabitha, was giving them that back. 

When she passed away, their loss was at LEAST doubled.  From being a recognized member of society, with a position as wives to their husbands, through to the experience of losing the man on whom their position depended, and therefore their identity, and now to be in a position of contemplating losing the new identity they were just beginning to regain … that was a whole new experience for them, it was completely unexpected, and yet, Jesus had found a way through his disciple Tabitha to give them that sense of self, of worth, of value, back.

And in the face of that second great loss, Jesus sends Peter, who reestablishes that presence in their lives.  In a very concrete sense, Jesus brought life back to their lives.  And it wasn’t in the person of Tabitha, strictly speaking, nor was it through the person of Peter… though they were both involved. 

It was through his OWN presence – THROUGH THEM. 

William Loader, research professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, put it this way:

The good news is about bringing life where there is death, love where there is hate, healing where there is brokenness. The greater wonder today is when we can see people stand on their feet, communities make their way out of traps of poverty, enemies move towards reconciliation, despairing people finding meaning again. These are realities which take up the direction or flow of what would otherwise be legends left to the past. They invite us to take such stories as symbols of what is an abiding value and through them to find the hand of God in new beginnings today. 

And that IS one thing that God in Christ was and is still about even today: New Beginnings. 

In the face of a world that would generally write off anyone who is not young, rich and beautiful, we have this story of lives that are being transformed.

It is worth noting that Luke makes an initial reference to her name as Tabitha in Aramaic or Hebrew, but then says her name was Dorcas in Greek and then refers to her by that name throughout the rest of the narrative I don’t think that detail would have been lost on the listeners or readers of the Gospel in the first century.  Not only do they see Peter, a Jewish man, and Dorcas, a Greek named woman, working together to form and sustain this community, but it is an image of the body of Christ – the church – personified through them – being an active part in the redemption and the transformation of lives that had been written off. 

Where does Jerusalem Baptist Church fit into the story?

What role are we playing in this passage this morning?  Are we the widows, weeping for what has been lost?  Our sense of purpose, our identity, our base?  Or are we Dorcas, lying cold on the bed, dead to the world until Jesus comes along in the person of Peter and prays life into us once again?

On a slightly different note, what does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton today?

Are we going to let the dead remain dead, as most of the people, named or not in the story, were ready to do, or are we going to imagine something completely, radically different from the reality we’ve lived with all our lives, one that allows for the completely unexpected to happen – and for God to work through that to redeem humanity to God’s self?  Can we be as bold as Peter and pray for an incredible miracle to happen in this very room?  Can we follow that prayer with two simple words, “Jerusalem, arise”?

Let’s pray.

Break Fast Alfresco

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Easter 3C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 21:1-19

“After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. ²Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. ³Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. ⁴Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. ⁵Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” ⁶He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. ⁷That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. ⁸But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off. ⁹When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. ¹⁰Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” ¹¹So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. ¹²Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. ¹³Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. ¹⁴This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

¹⁵When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” ¹⁶A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” ¹⁷He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. ¹⁸Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” ¹⁹(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

So we get into the last chapter of John’s account of the Gospel, and the writer jumps from telling about the events surrounding Thomas’ doubting that Jesus had arisen to another appearance of Jesus in which Thomas is also present, but not the central figure in the retelling. 

This time, it’s Peter.  SIMON Peter.  You know, the Rock, the brash, outspoken, mercurial follower of Jesus who gave a body to the parable of the sower’s rocky soil - he consistently receives Jesus’ teachings with joy and exuberance, but as soon as he is confronted with some sort of hardship FOR that teaching, he tends to abandon it … his denial of Jesus on the night before he was crucified is only one example.  In the Acts of the Apostles we find him accepting the vision that gave him permission to eat anything – with anyone – but as soon as the folks show up and tell him that the purity laws still apply, he seems to discard the vision without too much of a fight.

What are we to do with Peter? 

Do we laugh at his humanity, chuckle at his weakness?  Shake our heads at his impetuous nature, his second-guessing of his own beliefs? 

If we do any of that, then we must realize that we are doing it to ourselves.      

Ultimately, I believe that the narratives of the Gospels purposefully present a varied portrait of the disciples for one simple reason:  each of the writers wants the folks reading or listening to the story to be able to relate to the people they are reading or hearing ABOUT.  It is one of the critical ways in which we connect to the Gospel story:  where do we fit in?  Where do I fit in?

Here they are, having experienced the passion of Jesus, witnessed his resurrection, SEEN him appear in a locked room and SHOW them the nail prints and the wound in his side, and what do they do? 

They go home.  They retreat to the familiar, to the ordinary, to the everyday routine that they’d not experienced AT ALL over the last three years.

They had heard Jesus speak, watched him heal, and confront, and cleanse, and forgive, and even raise from the dead, and they turned from that and went back to what they had always known.

In a very real way, they were modeling what we do every week.

What can we say about an existence that incorporates the worship of a living God, a risen Savior, a time of communion and fellowship with the creator of the universe, into a weekly routine? 

On the one hand, part of me would celebrate the fact that it IS part of the routine.  The fact that we are able to consistently gather and sing, read, pray, study, and hear the word of God for our lives together is a beautiful opportunity that not everyone who WISHES to in the world CAN.  On the other hand, the fact that it is part of the ‘routine’ in and of itself can be a dangerous thing. 

It is dangerous insofar as it becomes predictable.  It is dangerous in the sense that we can become immunized to the power of the Gospel IF we feel we have nothing new to learn from it – nothing different to understand from it, no new direction to explore at God’s prompting. 

The disciples – those seven that are mentioned in the passage, probably initially welcomed the chance to get BACK into a regular, familiar, KNOWN routine.  They’d been here before; they’d DONE this.  It came naturally to them.  Years of performing the same tasks meant that they hardly had to THINK about what they were doing, it was simply a matter of dropping back into that familiar boat, picking up that net, and throwing it over the side throughout the night to see what they could catch and sell at the market.  Nothing new there, nothing unknown about what to do next, they were the masters of that skill set.

The problem was, when they realized Jesus was on the shore, they ALL understood, not just Peter, that even retreating to the familiar, to the routine they’d all known before he came along and ruined them for the ordinary, that the rest of their lives were going to be marked by this radically new reality.  This fact that they had seen and spoken to the risen Jesus was not going to let them remain quiet about it.  They were going to be compelled to take that message – that Christ has risen – first INTO their lives, and then OUT OF their lives… in that they were going to be LIVING that truth out in such a way that people would wonder if they were even the same PEOPLE they knew BEFORE the crucifixion.     

It is difficult to understate the impact of the change in these disciples’ lives on the world.  Some critics would speak up and say that the only reason the church continues in existence today is because of it’s marriage to the powers – military and political structures – throughout the centuries, beginning with Emperor Constantine and continuing with any given church-state union in the intervening centuries. 

But do we really want to write off the fact that we are here today, that we are engaged in this business of working out what salvation means to the way we live our lives to some understandably questionable merging of faith and worldly power?  Can we step back from the historical baggage that we carry – and believe me, we DO carry some baggage, not ONLY within our Southern Baptist tradition but in almost any given denominational tradition – and tease out that thread of faith that runs throughout the tapestry of the work of God in the world throughout history?  That brightly colored thread that stands out from all the muted colors that bleed into the background and, while they DO make for a strong cloth, they also don’t add much to the beauty of the picture that God is weaving together with us?

Jesus’ first act when he reappeared to his disciples was to break bread with them.  In the passage this morning, he is again feeding them – broiled fish and bread cooked by the heat from the bonfire he built on the beach that morning.  They had been working all night, and had not eaten.  They had been fasting.  And Jesus called to them from the shore and told them to throw their nets on the other side of the boat. 

They were fishermen.  They’d done the work all their lives.  They understood on a gut level that what Jesus was asking them to do was nonsense.  If there hadn’t been fish on one side of the boat, it was because they weren’t biting PERIOD.  They had probably fished off both sides of the boat dozens of times throughout the night with exactly the same results each time.  Zip.  Nada.  Zilch.  Cipher.  Had it been anyone else’s idea, they would have laughed, if not cursed him for being so stupid as to suggest such a thing. 

But it wasn’t anyone else.  It was Jesus. 

And it wasn’t that he was asking them to throw the nets over the right side of the boat, even though those were the words he used. 

He was asking them to trust him.

He was asking them to be willing to do what to other fishermen – friends they’d worked with and lived beside all their lives – would seem to be utter and complete foolishness because HE was asking them to do it. And he wanted them to trust HIM with the results, not their own well-honed skills and knowledge. 

Ultimately, that invitation is the same one that Jesus extends to us everyday.  He invites us to break our fasting, to stop nibbling crumbs from his bounty of life that he has waiting for us and to start ‘tucking in’. 

The problem, if you want to think of it that way, is that, for all the exhilaration and astonishment and surprising and surpassing joy that he promises, there IS an element of risk in doing what Jesus asks.  Aside from that ‘foolishness’ that we could be accused of, there is the risk of being branded, being written off, being considered a part of the fringe rather than the mainstream.    

My question for us all here today is, looking at the Gospel story, and at the life of Jesus, when was following him ever perceived to be the norm? When was it ever mainstream to sacrificially offer yourself in the place of others?  When was routine to be in such strong communion with the Father that we would be willing to take the cup, and become the body of Christ?

Let’s pray.

Come To Believe

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Easter 2C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 20:19-31

“¹⁹When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²²When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” ²⁴But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. ²⁵So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

²⁶A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁷Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” ²⁸Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” ²⁹Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” ³⁰Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. ³¹But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

Periodically, it is helpful to step back from the details of the Gospel narratives and look at the broader picture of what the writers were trying to accomplish.  That’s what the four people on the front of our bulletin this morning symbolize:  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, … they COULD be otherwise known as ‘John and the Gospelaires’ – singing their latest hit “He Arose” (see?  They’re even doing the hand motions … I thought I’d have a little fun with the cover this morning … hope that’s not too irreverent! (Although that second one from the right DOES kind of look like a woman, though, doesn’t she? … who knows … it WAS common practice to write under the name of the person or master or teacher you followed in the first century … and even into the second and third centuries).

But it is important to keep a broader perspective as we DO study the texts and explore the ramifications of what they meant to the early church and what they mean to us today.     

Today’s story is all too familiar.  It’s where the term ‘Doubting Thomas’ originated.  It’s where we direct those who place conditions on their belief for factual proof in order TO believe for the word that Jesus has for them – namely: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

That word – that blessing of those who believe in spite of not having seen, which, as the years went by, quickly became the majority of the followers of The Way – of Jesus Christ – is a word that speaks now to every single person who hears the Gospel, or sees it lived out in some way.  It covers the totality of those who today consider themselves to be followers of Christ. 

I was listening to a lecture this week, a professor at Duke Divinity School, who had actually taken his sessions during Holy Week and was running through the varying accounts of the passion of Christ.  With two of the Gospels, Mark and John, he summarized their messages in this way:  They are both passion narratives with a lengthy introduction.  In other words, the sum total of the Gospels of Mark and of John – the focus and ultimate purpose, is to relate the story of Christ’s last week of life – in the Gospel of John it is actually more like half the Gospel is the prelude to the last twenty-four HOURS of Jesus’ life, the second half – in terms of volume of text – occupies those last 24 hours of Jesus’ life. 

To be intellectually and spiritually honest, we have to ask ourselves the question that follows that statement:  Why did the Gospel writers spend so much time on the passion narrative? 

Here’s the thing:  the disciples lived with Jesus for a MINIMUM of three years – that’s 156 weeks, give or take … and when they or their followers sat down to finally record that story of what it all meant, they spent an inordinate amount of time on 1/156^th of the total time they spent together.  What does that tell us about how the disciples ended up viewing the end of Jesus’ life? 

It would seem to be somewhat important, wouldn’t you agree? 

The question has to be faced because it has bearing on how we view the rest of Jesus’ ministry – the weeks, months, and years prior to his last week of life.      

The narratives vary.  That is, I believe, a function of the individuals who wrote them and the communities to whom they were writing.  Matthew seems to have been writing to a community that had a strong sense of it’s Jewish identity, but which had had a falling out with the larger Jewish community from which it came – those who did NOT understand or believe that Jesus was the Messiah.  Luke was writing to a gentile community and focused on Jesus’ interactions with the gentiles throughout the course of his public ministry.  Mark seems to have been writing to a community – a church – a group of believers – who were struggling with the issue of why the Messiah – the promised one of God – had to suffer in order to fulfill scripture.  And John was writing long after all the others were gone, close to the end of his life, if not AT the end – there’s some indication that the final verses of John’s Gospel were written by a disciple of his following his death – in response to doubts that arose when Jesus had not returned prior to John’s death.  The focus of John’s Gospel is much more theological than historical – not that the synoptics – the other three Gospels – are NOT theological in their content – they ARE – but the degree to which John is blatantly making statements about who Jesus was, who he said he was, and who he was perceived to be by the disciples and his other followers to be is exponentially greater than in the other three narratives.  It comes clear in this key phrase that Thomas utters in his encounter with the risen Christ: 

“My Lord and my God!”    

And the writer of John all but spells out the reason the story was written down at all just two verses later: 

³¹But these [signs Jesus did] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

That is the bottom line for John.  It is the whole reason for the Gospel to have been put down on paper – or papyrus, as the case may be, maybe vellum.  The point is, the writer has spent his life telling this story, explaining it, coming to terms in his own mind with who Jesus was, and realizing that he was getting close to his final days, he, like the other Gospel writers before him, decided to put down in writing what he’d been teaching and living for all these decades:  The story of Jesus’ time on earth. 

His reason for spending so much time on those last few days of Jesus’ life is the same reason that we are faced with this morning.  What do we do with the rest of his life in light of the record we have of his last days?  What sort of weight do we put on the claims of the Gospel writers in light of how THEY lived THEIR lives after Jesus’ resurrection?   

It bears repeating, revisiting, restating, and reemphasizing:  the most compelling argument for the resurrection of Christ is in comparing the lives of his disciples and followers before and after his crucifixion and resurrection.   

I think it is safe to say that Jesus taught an ethic of life that was exemplary.  He lived it as well.  His call to obedience, to sacrifice, to self-giving love is so counter-cultural in any given context that it easily falls into the category of ‘revolutionary’ when compared to the general expectations of the world as we see it and know it to be. 

Jesus’ call to forgiveness and redemption and the sharing that the disciples lived out after his death presented a model of living in community that most establishment religions would wrestle with trying to explain in the light of their self-sustaining interests throughout history. 

But however revolutionary, however dynamic and charismatic a teacher he was, his teachings may have remained with us as a footnote to history POSSIBLY, but most likely they would have faded INTO history HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR radically transformed lives that KEPT HAPPENING long after his disciples were off the scene and long gone.

What do we have that might explain that … persistence of impact? 

We have Jesus’ promise of continuing presence through the Holy Spirit.  We have the promise of his return, we have the commission received to BE HIS BODY on earth until he returns.  So we live in that promise, in that hope, and in that task to which he has called us.  

And all that has brought us to the point of coming to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the chosen one of God.  Thanks be to God!

Let’s pray.